Chapter 23 023

Chapter 23 023
Chapter 23
Daphne's POV

He didn't speak for a long time.

The garden held the silence around us without apology, the cold morning air sitting still between us as though it too was waiting to see what he would do with what I had just handed him. I kept my eyes on his face. I had said it plainly and I was not going to look away from the consequences of that.

His expression was unreadable in the way it sometimes was — not blank, there was too much behind his eyes for blank, but controlled in the way that things are controlled when a great deal of force is being applied to keep them that way.

"Since the second day," he said finally.

"Yes."

"And you said nothing."

"No."

His jaw shifted. "Why."

"Because you had just been betrayed by the last woman who stood in front of you with a claim on your life," I said. "Because I had no wolf, no bond signal on my side that you could feel. Because anything I said would have sounded like manipulation and you had every reason to believe it was." I paused. "And because I needed to know, before I told you, that you were someone I could tell safely."

Something moved through him at that. I saw it travel through his whole body, a slow wave of something that was not anger, or not only anger.

"And now," he said.

"And now I know," I said.

He crossed the distance between us in two steps.

He stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin up to hold his gaze, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him against the cold morning air, close enough that breathing required a different kind of attention than it had a moment ago. His eyes moved over my face with the focused intensity he brought to everything, but stripped of the management he usually layered over it. There was nothing managed about the way he was looking at me now.

His hand came up slowly and his fingers touched my jaw, just the tips of them, the lightest possible contact, as though he was giving me every opportunity to step back.

I didn't step back.

His thumb moved along my cheekbone and I felt it everywhere, a warmth that spread outward from that single point of contact through my whole body, dissolving something that had been held tightly in me for longer than I had words for. I had been touched before — not kindly, not with any intention toward my comfort — and I had learned to be somewhere else when it happened, to send the part of myself that mattered to a quiet internal room and wait there until it was over.

I was entirely present.

His other hand found my waist, settled there with a certainty that was not aggressive but was absolutely not tentative either. He knew what he was doing. He was doing it at a pace calibrated to my response rather than his impatience, which I understood cost him something, and the cost of it made it matter more.

"Daphne," he said. Low. My name in his mouth in that unguarded register he had used once in the garden and that I had felt for the rest of the day.

"Yes," I said. To the question he hadn't finished asking.

He made a sound low in his throat and then his mouth was on mine.

He kissed me the way he did everything — with his entire attention, nothing held back, no performance in it. His hand moved from my jaw into my hair and tilted my head back gently and I felt the cold garden air on my throat and his warmth against the length of me and I reached up and held the front of his coat with both hands because the ground felt suddenly unreliable.

He pulled back just enough to look at me. His breathing had changed. So had mine.

"You've been in this house for two weeks," he said. His voice was different now, lower, rougher at the edges.

"I know," I said.

"That's not long enough," he said. But he was still holding me, his hand still in my hair, his body still close enough that the statement and the reality of him were in direct contradiction.

"For what," I said.

"For you to be certain of anything about me," he said. "About this."

I looked up at him steadily. "I've been reading you since the first day," I said. "I've had to read people my entire life. I'm not uncertain."

His forehead came down against mine. His eyes closed briefly and in the space of that he looked less like an Alpha and more like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and had just, for a moment, been allowed to set it down.

I released his coat and brought my hands up to his face.

He stilled completely at that. As though the direction of the gesture undid something that had been wound tight in him — my hands on his face rather than his on mine, the care moving toward him rather than away.

I felt him exhale.

Then his arms came around me properly, fully, with a warmth and solidity that was nothing like restraint. He held me in the cold garden with the stripped rose canes against the repaired wall and his mother's lavender roots sleeping in the cleared soil and the morning light moving steadily across the stones, and I stood inside the circle of it and let myself be held by someone for the first time I could remember without calculating the cost of allowing it.

He pressed his lips to my temple. My forehead. The corner of my jaw. Each one deliberate, each one unhurried, each one the kind of touch that asks nothing and offers something anyway.

"I need you to keep telling me things," he said quietly against my hair. "True things. Whatever you're thinking. I don't want you deciding I can't handle something."

I turned my face into his shoulder.

"Only if you do the same," I said.

His arms tightened slightly.

"Yes," he said.

Outside the garden walls the rest of the compound was beginning its morning. Footsteps somewhere distant, voices, the ordinary sounds of a place full of people going about their lives. In the walled garden none of it reached us. We stayed where we were while the morning moved around us and the rose stood patient against the wall waiting for spring and something that had been dormant for a long time began, very quietly, to consider the possibility of warmth.